Attention all Knifemakers!.....Product dealers/retailers and/or knife makers/sharpeners/hobbyists (etc) are not permitted to insert business related text/videos/images (company/company name/product references) and/or links into your signature line, your homepage url (within the homepage profile box), within any posts, within your avatar, nor anywhere else on this site. Market research (such as asking questions regarding or referring to products/services that you make/offer for sale or posting pictures of finished projects) is prohibited. These features are reserved for supporting vendors and hobbyists.....Also, there is no need to announce to the community that you are a knifemaker unless you're trying to sell something so please refrain from sharing.
Thanks for your co-operation!

If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

I've never had the opportunity to vote with my dollars. For some reason, when I have money to buy things, everyone is out of stock, except for one or two places. One is from a seller I know of, and the other is some backwoods website that focuses on bonsai trees or something. Everyone's been pretty good to me, nobody seems to be making enough money to get really rude with everyone. When I do have a level choice of vendors(with anything I buy in my life) I always pick the smaller one, regardless of service or convenience, out of consideration.

As far as outsourcing calls, the one time I called CKTG was in like '09 and the call was answered "Chef knives to go, this is Mark". But I can assure you a call center rep would have majorly turned me off. Why not just hire another employee? It might be a cost effectiveness issue, and that speaks to the heart of a call center. It takes advantage of the inhumanity of a role a person(re:secretary) has by synthesizing it for something cheaper.

I say support the littlest guy, enough people are supporting the big ones.

Never owned my own business, so I've never had to worry about phone support, but I have had to worry about my employer's web presence. Where most retailers get slammed during the holidays, we used to get slammed during the spring and early summer. We just had three months where our average web traffic would quadruple with spikes that could be up to 23 x our average traffic. It got even worse if we ran a promotion during that time. While we could have gotten more hardware (the equivalent of getting another employee), that hardware STILL wouldn't be enough to handle our crazy peak season without shelling out MAJOR MAJOR moolah. So we partnered with a company that took our full traffic, and passed us what we could handle. And pricing being what it was, it was actually cheaper to just bring them on for the full year, rather than just three months. Only difference is that we knew that having them "on" all the time wasn't the best customer experience, so we made sure to only switch them on when we knew we needed it.

If Dave deals with all customers like he's dealt with me, that should read "I make MOST customers happy but there are a rare few I can't." I commissioned an 18x36 in mahogany and maple and made arrangements to pick it up Saturday. Saturday morning I get an email from him saying the colors aren't quite what he was anticipating, and that if I want, he'll make me a new board no questions asked, and doesn't want me to make the hour long trip for nothing. I head over anyway, and while he's right, the colors are a little different (the mahogany looked more like cherry and the maple was nearly as dark as oak) it was still a great looking board. I told him that I liked it and would be taking it home, at which point Dave says that if I get it home and change my mind just let him know and he'll do a new one. Now THAT is a customer-focused mentality. Thanks Dave, and I LOVE the board.